On Monday a whole moonscape emerged in a large plastic box. Moon sand was created using cornflour and oil, and boxes formed the craters on the moon surface. During the course of the day aliens, animals and even cars were added to develop a whole new world.
We have been tracing pictures of space craft and planets which is great for developing pencil control, hand eye co-ordination and concentration skills.
On Tuesday Jolly Jo adapted her games session to include throwing balls through the rocket and space ships flying around the hall.
The weather turned quite cold last week so outdoor sessions have been very lively to keep us warm We have played many group games such as What the time Mr Wolf? and Please Mr Crocodile. There have been a few games of football and the children have made their on goals using our small portable fence panels. The coloured mats were used as traffic lights for games with cars. We have had hot chocolate for snack on quite a few days this week which has proved very popular.
On Friday we baked cakes and once the “serious” business of mixing the ingredients was over, the children were able to continue mixing an creating their own mixture, simply to see how change and effect works.
We ended with a magic trick. Gill gathered the children into a circle and then asked one child to put large blobs of paint of paper on the floor. In turn, each child would add different paint and stir it with a paintbrush. Magically this changed the paint into a different colour. The children were very excited to see what would happen and many of them could accurately predict what colour would appear. This is a really fun way to introduce the idea of colour mixing and forms the basis of an early science experiment.
Other activities this week have been going on a pretend train ride to the seaside where we washed our hands in the sea for snack, playing with a sealife bricks set and building large towers with the large lego.
This week Squirrels pre-school joined Twitter so that we could send our space pictures all the way to the space station for Tim Peake to see. We are all hoping he will respond.......................
Words we have learned this week:
Baking
Space station
Ideas to continue this weeks fun at home:
Make some space biscuits or cakes together. Talk about what ingredients you might need and talk about the texture (thick, smooth, runny etc)